Urban Coach achieves 25% increased revenue and saves ₹400,000 using Bigin

The company

Dilip is the founder and director of Urban Coach— a study abroad consulting firm in India that has rapidly grown into a primary business of admission consulting, partnering with 4,500 universities across 26 countries. With a team of 15 employees and branches in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai, Dilip oversees primary sales and marketing while his partner heads the company. Their campaigns target individuals aged 20 to 32 to help them achieve their dreams of studying abroad.

Dilip's inspiration stemmed from his father's 30-year legacy in the same industry under a business called Datamatics. The 2008 US recession had a significant negative effect on the industry, leading to its decline. After completing his education, Dilip worked in digital marketing from 2016 to 2019. Having taken the GMAT himself, he began coaching students, which naturally extended into admission consulting. Within four years, this became their primary focus, with coaching evolving into a secondary service.

The challenge

Urban Coach primarily conducted campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to generate leads, which were then recorded in Excel spreadsheets. These sheets were subsequently assigned to teams across three branches for manual download. However, tracking these leads proved to be cumbersome and lacked accountability, with no measure in place to avoid data misuse. To address these issues and to avoid more significant challenges, Dilip decided to implement a CRM for better tracking and management of customer data.

He tried Freshsales, Pipedrive, and HubSpot, but found all of them to be too complicated and better suited for large organizations due to their extensive features.

The solution

Dilip used the seven-day free trial of Bigin, which was instrumental in his decision to proceed with the CRM. Currently, the team uses seven pipelines to streamline their process:

• Sales:Urban Coach runs marketing campaigns that target students who aspire to study abroad. Students interested in the programs provide their details, which the Bigin's Zapier integration transfers into Bigin's Contacts module. Each lead is assigned directly to a sales rep, depending on which branch is running the campaign that generated the lead.
• Enterprise sales:Dilip handles high-value leads to ensure a focused and prioritized approach to significant deals.
• Application process:Once leads are converted, students pay the registration fee and the application process begins. This triggers a welcome email to students through Bigin's automation feature. This pipeline includes gathering details about countries, budgets, funding, and college applications themselves.
• Visa pipeline:This pipeline tracks the entire visa process—document collection, visa submission, flight booking, and accommodation bookings. Document collection is managed through the File Cabinet add-on. Upon visa approval, deals move to the next pipeline via Bigin's Connected Records functionality.
• Loan pipeline:Urban Coach tracks students who need financial assistance in this pipeline.
• Forex pipeline:This pipeline handles currency conversion and ensures timely payments to colleges and hotel bookings for students.
• Test preparation pipeline:Urban Coach provides coaching to students to help prepare them for competitive exams required to enter their desired colleges. The company tracks the details of these students in this pipeline.

In addition to these primary pipelines, Urban Coach also uses sub-pipelines to manage various other operations.

• Forms
• List view and sheet view
• Mailchimp integration
• IMAP (email integration)
• Connected Records

Benefits and ROI

• Employees' productivity has improved by 50% compared to when they used spreadsheets.
• Bigin has contributed to a 25% increase in sales and revenue.
• Automating operations has resulted in an estimated cost savings of ₹300,000 to ₹400,000.
• Tags in Bigin enable the management team segment city-related data, budget efficiently, and deploy targeted marketing campaigns.

Looking forward

To further streamline communication, Dilip is keen on exploring Bigin's Zoom integration, which will enable users to schedule online meetings with students directly within Bigin.